People can make good estimates of other peoples' attitude towards a particular social interaction. In Malcolm Gladwell's popular book, Blink. The power of thinking without thinking, Little Brown (2005), at page 23, he describes the surprising power of “thin-slicing,” defined as “the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and people based on very narrow ‘slices’ of experience.” Gladwell's observations reflect decades of research in social psychology, and the term “thin slice” comes from a frequently cited study by Nalani Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, Slices of Expressive Behaviour as Predictors of Interpersonal Consequences: A Meta Analysis, PhD Thesis Harvard University (1992).
This work has shown that observers can accurately classify participants' attitude towards the social interaction that they are involved in (e.g., their interest, attraction, attentiveness, friendliness, determination, submissiveness, etc) from non-linguistic voice features using observations as short as six seconds! The accuracy of such ‘thin slice’ classifications are typically around 70%. One important mechanism that allows people to judge attitudes toward the social interaction is “tone of voice.” Indeed, perception of these non-linguistic social signals is often as important as linguistic or affective content in predicting behavioral outcomes as described by Ambrady and Rosenthal (cited above), and by Nass, C. and Brave, S., in Voice Activated: How People Are Wired for Speech and How Computers Will Speak with Us, MIT Press (2004). As used herein, the terms “social signals” and “social signaling,” refers to the non-linguistic “tone of voice” characteristics of a human speech message that indicate the speaker's attitude or state of mind.